Posted
by
Soulskillon Friday April 11, 2014 @01:43PM
from the power-up-the-manhunt dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The Associated Press reports that Pacific Gas & Electric Co. has put up a $250,000 reward for 'information leading to an arrest and conviction in a startling attack mounted nearly a year ago on telephone lines and the power grid in Silicon Valley.' Besides cutting power lines, the attackers also cut AT&T fiber-optic phone lines, thereby denying some people access to 911, and fired shots into a PB&E substation, knocking out 17 transformers in Silicon Valley and causing $15 million in damage. As of this post, the perpetrators are still unidentified and continue to elude the FBI. Meanwhile, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) on Thursday was brought before the Senate Energy Committee to explain why the FERC disseminated via insecure media a sensitive document describing where all the nation's power grids are particularly sensitive to a physical attack. FERC responded with assurances that databases are currently being scrubbed and procedures being implemented to safeguard critical data."

. Meanwhile, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) on Thursday was brought before the Senate Energy Committee to explain why the FERC disseminated via insecure media a sensitive document describing where all the nation's power grids are particularly sensitive to a physical attack.

Because nobody will take security seriously until something bad happens? And once that something bad happens there will be plenty of people screaming, "False flag!"

We all should ware Kevlar vests to protect us from shootings. Those who got killed and didn't wear a Kevlar vest is their own damn fault.

You find a flaw, you report it. If they choose not to act and something goes wrong, it is the guys who failed to take actions fault, with the guy who did the crime, you end up the Hero. If you find a flaw and exploit it. It is all your fault, and you are the villain.

Because nobody will take security seriously until something bad happens?

Well, no. It's because the document wasn't actually sensitive. Anyone who actually might want to cripple our infrastructure already knows how to do that, because they have access to satellite imagery like everyone else. Also, not being complete fucking idiots, they know how to read the reports that all corporations are required to file which include information on things like new construction projects, including their function and location.

"As it turns out, one guy in a pickup truck can cripple a city's ability to function. You don't think that any enemies could muster those kind of resources? Nobody is even trying."
You have no idea is anyone is really trying. None of us do. 30 guys with 30 pickup trucks, 30 hunting rifles shooting armor-piercing bullets (available almost anywhere in the USA), could easily take out transformers over a wide area, and cripple a region's ability to function.

How much we should worry depends on the probability and the scale of the impact of the bad event.

This was mostly like one drunk teenager. To extrapolate from this one-off incident, and conclude that we need to spend a trillion dollars to harden every piece of infrastructure is silly. People are advocating the spending because they hope to get a slice of it. If we are going to spend money to harden our infrastructure, we should be focused on high probability incidents like lightening strikes, and not bullets. The bullet problem should be dealt with by making it more difficult for teenagers to buy be

i wish you were right on this. this attack was no drunken stunt. it was deliberate and calculated. i advocate hardening our vital infrastructure and i don't get any piece of the pie. the power grid goes down for any length of time, people are going to die.

ignore and hide from the facts all you like it won't change the fact that people around the world wish to do us harm and are working to do so.

The people spinning the "deliberate and calculated" interpretation are the same people that benefit from increased security spending. According to William of Ockham [slashdot.org], it was a drunk teenager.

drunk teenager is not the answer with the fewest assumptions if you take into account the facts.

"involved snipping AT&T fiber-optic lines to knock out phone and 911 service in the area and firing shots into a PG&E substation."

how do you get drunk teenager from that? from your years as a wild youth coordinating safe ingress and egress from locations allowing deliberate phone line sabotage and long range high powered rifle targeting intermediate power supply stations on a whim after too many beers?

drunk teenager is not the answer with the fewest assumptions if you take into account the facts.

"involved snipping AT&T fiber-optic lines to knock out phone and 911 service in the area and firing shots into a PG&E substation."

how do you get drunk teenager from that? from your years as a wild youth coordinating safe ingress and egress from locations allowing deliberate phone line sabotage and long range high powered rifle targeting intermediate power supply stations on a whim after too many beers?

the only razor applied here was the one to any hint of sanity.

Access to the fiber-optic lines that were damaged included lifting a 200 or 300 lb metal manhole cover. I doubt one person could have done this.

The morons of the Survivalist or Militia movements could take down the entire US electrical grid tomorrow were they able to stop fighting amongst themselves long enough. A score of more-or-less simultaneous strikes like this spread at random across the country would crash the grid, hard. You don't need inside information, deep understanding of the power distribution system, electrical engineering training, financing, or high tech weaponry, nothing more than a watch, a deer rifle and a vehicle to get you there. Electrical engineers have been complaining about this for well over two decades, but since making the grid more resilient will cost money the suits don't want to listen. If Al Qaeda were really what the gov't has tried to convince us they were you'd be without power several days a week.

The morons of the Survivalist or Militia movements could take down the entire US electrical grid tomorrow

Yet there is no evidence that they are planning to do so, or that they have any motive to do so. The plan you describe would require the covert cooperation of hundreds people that you describe as "morons", without a single one leaking the plan. How likely is that?

Electrical engineers have been complaining about this for well over two decades

Hundreds? How many people do you think it takes to fire a hunting rifle? Or did you not know that A Score = 20?

There are a LOT of people who dislike the US at this point, including Mexican drug cartels, survivors of US military massacres in Iraq and Afghanistan, Russian mafiosos, and a number of governments, and we're not making any more friends either. Of course there's also the possibility, no, the certainty of another Carrington Event. For that matter, currency and futures speculators could make a

Of course there's also the possibility, no, the certainty of another Carrington Event.

There is also the certainty that their will, eventually, be another school stabbing like we had this week. So should every student wear a hockey mask and knife proof vest? There are BILLIONS of places where a rifle shot could cause damage. Yet it almost never happens. Lightning strikes are a thousand times more likely. Instead of trying to think of a million scenarios where a trillion in spending could prevent some black swan event, it would be far better to spend that money on flexible rapid response

Lightning strike is a point event, a local area disrupted temporarily. Remember the big blackout in the northeast a few years ago? Most of the physical damage was repaired or re-routed around in a day, the reason that it took a week for power to be fully restored is because it takes that long to recreate and rebalance all the energy flow. It's almost all manual, very little automation in the process, and entailed overtime by all the available specialists in the field throughout the entire region, bringin

Hell, some of the more maladjusted friends of mine from my High School graduating class could pull that off. One doesn't even need to get the Survivalist or Militia movements to put off their infighting.. You just need a few angry, maladjusted people around the country who share the idea at the same time.

Fortunately, I've explained to all of them why terrorism doesn't work.

"More easily", sure. But if somebody is willing to cut cables and shoot guns at equipment, it is more reasonable to worry about catching them afterwards than preventing it. Making the entire grid literally bullet proof is a preposterous idea.

I've been thinking about this a lot as I listen to Kevin Mitnick's autobio, Ghost in the Wires. He devotes his entire life to circumventing various defenses, then laughs at everybody for being 'so easily' fooled. His entire view is basically juvenile - that everything (such as the phone system) just naturally exists and ought to be perfect, so it's amazing if he can prove otherwise. When in fact nobody ever said it was. All the stuff that exists and usually works is just the product of mostly ordinary people doing their 9-5 jobs and trying to keep the wheels turning until their shift ends so they can go home and do something else.

" Making the entire grid literally bullet proof" is a straw man. Nobody is thinking of that, and it isn't really possible. What is possible and reasonable is hardening critical infrastructure, improving redundancy, and making it easier to repair. If all you are prepared to do is cut cables and shoot a high power rifle that isn't going to get you very far very quickly against some elementary precautions for various parts of the infrastructure.

TV news is generally forgettable, but two TV news reports from the '90s really stood out for me:

1. After a series of brush fires considered likely to be arson, a reporter stood in front of a canyon, named the location, and reported the fire dept was saying it would be particularly dangerous if someone started a fire in this canyon or others similar to it, because of reasons X, Y, and Z...

2. After several kids were hospitalized after ingesting jimson weed tea, the news report warned kids not to make jimson

By Marine Major General Smedley Butler: http://www.ratical.org/ratvill... [ratical.org] "WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the bene

Yes, but for most people in california that would represent several years worth of income, and since rewards generally try to attract the attention of as many people as possible in the hopes someone knows something, 'does not appeal to wealthy people', who, by definition, are rather rare, is not a big concern.

Not sure exactly what lines but, if I remember right, distribution lines are in the 13kV range.... you don't just "cut" them with a pair of dykes. The result of the connection being disrupted can generate some amazing sparks. Electricians who work on circuits like that wear protective suits:https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]

Could be, though we don't know for sure if they actually knew this (not unlikely) or if they just got lucky in having chosen a method which was both accessible and didn't expose them to personal danger. Certainly, if they didn't know this, and chose different methods, they may not have gotten past the first one.

Get rid of most of the useless garbage and institute a simpler system:

1. Declare certain sites strategic risk sites which means their security personnel have heightened authority to detain and shoot suspects similar to sensitive federal facilities.2. Encourage said site operators to hire US Army and USMC veterans.3. Arm said veterans with selective fire weapons and have them regularly patrol these sites.

Faster, cheaper and more accountable (private security guards have no qualified immunity).

Actually I prefer more of their profits going into maintenance such as clearing tree branches growing into power lines, replacing sagging lines and decaying poles. Infrastructure! It's what keeps this country going. Wasting on more on security for something that happens very rarely is not good investment into future (but hey like most Americans don't think of such things).

The thing I get is why not just have the government run security for them in the first place?

That's what I don't get about breeder reactors. People argue that terrorists will get their hands on weapons-grade materials. So instead we plan to bury tons of waste underground if we ever find a place we can store it, at a cost of billions of dollars.

It would make a lot more sense to just stick the breeder reactors in the middle of army bases. Security isn't THAT hard of a problem since we already guard actual functional nuclear warheads. Surely if the terrorists can't get their hands on those, we can protect some fuel located in the middle of a reactor core under boiling water which is only n% weapons-grade material.

It's probably because the "problem of proliferation" is repeated over again as if it were a mantra. The purpose of mantra is to transform the practitioners mind. Proliferation awareness has now transcended most parts of the population to a whole new level of being.

These attacks have cost them 10s to 100s of millions. Yet, they are only willing to put up.25M. This shows how poorly ran American companies are today.

The amount of money they offer for a reward only has to be high enough to make it worthwhile for someone who has information to come forward. The amount of money they lost in the attack is really irrelevant. It's not like they'll get that money back if there's a conviction.

Given the size of transmission-line towers, the guy in the van would need a rather large bomb to actually make the tower collapse. Multiply by the number of towers he'd need to destroy, and I think that one van might not be large enough. Also, getting your hands on that quantity of explosives isn't easy or cheap.

The simple truth is that most people are too busy trying to run their own lives to go around making other peoples miserable. Of those who are determined to do so, most either become traffic wardens or run for political office.

Despite the alphabet soup of government agencies, surveillance and Federal laws, America is a pretty easy place to move around and generally maintain a low profile. And many "critical infrastructure" sites really aren't well defended/guarded -- take your pick, a handful of people with nominal skill and training could cause all manner of chaos.

If the risk of attack was really that great, why haven't we seen it by now?

I always hesitate to ask this question and post too many specific examples for fear of attracting the wrong kind of attention, but let's just take oil refining as an example. The last time they closed a refinery down for maintenance two states away, the price of gas here shot up quite a bit -- we all hear the stories about inadequate refinery capacity. So what happens if 3 or 4 refineries go offline at the same time in close geographic proximity? Are we talking just a buck a gallon price hike, or are we talking shortages worse than the infamous 1970s gas lines along with all the attendant economic disruption?

I think if there were people intent on doing real damage, we would have seen it by now. It's a trivial armchair exercise to think of things that make you go "whoa!" And if you think of actual, organized sabotage involving direct state sponsorship and not just theocratic nutjobs the scenarios get even worse because you're now talking training that goes beyond emptying AK-47s in the desert.

the criminally shoddy work of a corporation that managed to explode an entire neighborhood.

I don't think, it is fair to accuse a corporation of "shoddy work", when it took an armed group — sophisticated enough to be still at large — to cause the mayhem.

Or do you want each power-transmission mast to be guarded by soldiers? What about fiber-optic cables, which were cut — should that too be patrolled by the military — the alternative to "corporations" you despise so much? To me the "cu

Meanwhile, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) on Thursday was brought before the Senate Energy Committee to explain why the FERC disseminated via insecure media a sensitive document describing where all the nation's power grids are particularly sensitive to a physical attack. FERC responded with assurances that databases are currently being scrubbed and procedures being implemented to safeguard critical data."

A little late to be scrubbing them now that the information is out there... Better beg

There is a $250k reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction in this property damage case. Meanwhile, there is a $10k reward for information leading to the arrest of the person or people responsible for firing at least 13 shots (and counting) at people along a highway (http://www.kctv5.com/story/25225197/detectives-tracking-75-tips-about-highway-shootings). It's a weird society we live in.

Well designed systems have redundancies. Go ahead. Shoot out a couple of transformers. We'll just switch sources. The interesting thing will be if this reward gets someone caught. That might be the best economic solution. There's only so much security you can build in to a system. But if it becomes known that you will be caught, and possibly based on evidence provided by your co-conspirators, people will think twice before pulling this crap.

Or right wing anti-government groups, or left wing radical environmentalists, or some random cult, or some kind of false flag that quietly got dropped instead of milked, or some really dedicated jerks with too much free time. Or maybe time travelers who realized that the particular security station in question was going to be the first network node to become sentient and send humanity down a the long dark path of extermination thus they took it out first. Heros I tell you, heros!